Winbond
More info
- Released
- 1987
- Type
- Semiconductor company
- Website
- winbond.com
Taiwanese memory maker whose eight-pin flash chips sit on almost every motherboard.
Founded in 1987 in Hsinchu Science Park, Taiwan's answer to Silicon Valley. Winbond makes specialty DRAM and, above all, serial NOR flash – small chips that talk over the SPI bus and hold a few megabytes.
That sounds modest, but it is where a PC's BIOS or UEFI lives, and where the firmware sits in routers, dev boards and smart gadgets. Anyone who has reflashed a router with a test clip has almost certainly read out a W25Q part. The logic business was spun off as Nuvoton in 2008.